Friday, October 03, 2008

Cleansing

In an attempt to rid the body of harmful substances that create a negative effect on individual health, some people opt for a body cleanse or detoxification to achieve this goal. Cleansing consists of altering the diet, ingesting herbal supplements, and employing physical treatments to rid the body of supposed harmful substances and build up. Whether cleansing works or not is widely debated, but the idea of clearing out waste in the body is generally a good idea, yet we only focus on the physical body when we discuss cleansing.

If cleansing does work the way it is intended, we will have to repeat the process many times over because we seldom think of cleansing the mind, which ultimately made the decision to ingest the toxins we wish to cleanse.

The search for immediate results without making personal sacrifice has led us to spend billions of dollars a year on quick fixes and snake oil. In doing so, we have placed an extreme amount of importance on a “healthy” body while neglecting the mind, which has led us to become “a mile wide and an inch deep”. So what exactly does this mean? Ultimately it means that if you are not cleansing your mind, re-patterning your thought process, and changing your behaviors, you will never attain depth.

If we really wish to cleanse ourselves of toxins, we must begin with the brain because it is the organ that makes decisions. The physical, social, emotional, and spiritual toxins we carry with us has everything to do with the past, present, and future decisions we have made and will make. Despite this, we focus on the “mile wide” first impression where we can tell everyone of the holistic approach we now take in life, while continuing to pollute ourselves through negative life decisions. In doing so we remain stagnant and “an inch deep”, so caught up in ourselves that we actually believe that people can’t see right through us.

The greatest waste you collect in life is accumulating in your brain, not your bowels, and the only remedy to “cleanse” it is to cognitively break it down. Your initial urge is just your past telling you the easiest way to achieve instant gratification. Reality is in the thought that comes after the urge, when you can actually understand cause and effect.

Your real cleansing will come when you create the power necessary to understand that depth far outweighs width, the mind leads the body, and you are far more transparent than you actually think you are. In “cleansing” we must first clean out our soul, clear our minds, and then make the decision to add depth in our lives. This way we can actually back up our claims of creating a new lifestyle, one that is free of toxins and has no cost, only returns.